Posts Tagged "chimpanzee"

Extraordinary claims, Carl Sagan liked to say, require extraordinary evidence. Here is an extraordinary claim: "Chimpanzeelike violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression." The anthropologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University made this statement in his 1996 book Demonic Males: [...]

Every week, hockey-playing science writer John Horgan takes a puckish, provocative look at breaking science. A teacher at Stevens Institute of Technology, Horgan is the author of four books, including The End of Science (Addison Wesley, 1996) and The End of War (McSweeney's, 2012). John can be found on Twitter as @Horganism.

A few months ago I had a conversation with someone who had just canceled a long-planned trip to see mountain gorillas in Uganda. It wasn’t an easy decision, but she had just gotten over a bad case of the flu. She knew that many human diseases have made their way into gorilla populations and didn’t [...]

Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. John R. can be found on Twitter as @johnrplatt.

A long-in-place loophole that exempted captive-bred chimpanzees from the full protections of the Endangered Species Act may finally be closed, Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), announced on June 11. For decades now, wild-born chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have been classified as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Captive-born chimps, [...]

Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. John R. can be found on Twitter as @johnrplatt.

As tens of thousands of refugees crowd into the area around Virunga National Park in the warn-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the animals that already lived there are getting squeezed out their native habitats. Some of them apparently aren’t too happy about it. Incidents of chimpanzee attacks on humans are reportedly on the [...]

Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. John R. can be found on Twitter as @johnrplatt.

When a wild animal is rescued from poachers or wildlife smugglers, conservationists usually make an effort to rehabilitate it and return it to life in its native habitat. But what if the animal contracted a disease from humans during captivity that could then be transmitted back to the rest of its species? Should that animal [...]

Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. John R. can be found on Twitter as @johnrplatt.

His name is Clay. He’s a happy, creative 24-year-old male who prefers to live in solitude. Although most of the time he is peaceful, he has been known to become aggressive and violent in a manner that can terrify the people who love him. If Clay were human, he would probably have been diagnosed with [...]

Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. John R. can be found on Twitter as @johnrplatt.

In a move that’s probably long overdue, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced last week that it will conduct a status review to determine if captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) should be reclassified from “threatened” to the more protected status “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Wild-born chimpanzees have been fully protected under [...]

Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. John R. can be found on Twitter as @johnrplatt.

Earlier this month, scientists for the Pan African Sanctuaries Alliance presented new research that predicted the extinction of the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti), the world’s rarest chimpanzee subspecies, within as little as 20 years. Now, just a few weeks later, a conservation plan written by primate experts from 17 conservation groups and government agencies [...]

Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. John R. can be found on Twitter as @johnrplatt.

DNA testing could be used as a tool to help fight smuggling of endangered chimpanzees, according to a study published this week in the journal BMC Ecology. Although they are still the most common apes in Africa, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes and their related subspecies) have experienced population drops of around 75 percent in the past [...]

Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. John R. can be found on Twitter as @johnrplatt.

Tanzania’s chimpanzee population has plummeted by more than 90 percent, from 10,000 a few years ago to just 700 today, according to a report from the Tanzania National Parks Authority. The Parks Authority blamed disease and predation — by humans and other mammals — for the dramatic losses. The country’s chimpanzees are located in just [...]

Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. John R. can be found on Twitter as @johnrplatt.

The most important sign language study done with an ape was surely the first one back in the 1960s, with Washoe, for it established that chimpanzees can use American Sign Language (ASL). The most decisive such study, however, was probably the one a decade later, with Nim Chimsky because it put a halt to such [...]

With one misstep and the snap of a trap, Tinka was broken. The 50-year-old chimpanzee’s hands were mangled and left severely deformed and almost useless. Most of the muscles of his left wrist were paralyzed, and he was left with a limited range of movement. His left hand just sat there in a hooked position, [...]

Editor’s Note: This post is the third in a four-part series of essays for Scientific American by primatologist Frans de Waal on human nature, based on his ongoing research. (The first post, on our sense of fairness, can be read here, and a second post, on the impact of crowding, is here.) De Waal and [...]

Image: 1936 Joy Oil gas station blueprints (top); sequence from human chromosome 1 (bottom). Source: from A Monkey’s Blueprint by Martin Krzywinski on SA Visual When artist Martin Krzywinski was challenged to come up with a graphic that quickly and concisely shows how the human genome is more similar to chimpanzee and bonobo genomes than [...]

Kalliopi Monoyios is an independent science illustrator. She has illustrated several popular science books including Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Find her at www.kalliopimonoyios.com.
Kalliopi can be found on Twitter as @symbiartic.

A large portion of what animals do is interact with each other. As a social species, we can hardly go an hour without some kind of interaction with another human, be it face-to-face or via text or email. Even animals that aren’t particularly social still generally have to interact with each other once in a [...]

Imagine that you walk into a room, where three people are sitting, facing you. Their faces are oriented towards you, but all three of them have their eyes directed towards the left side of the room. You would probably follow their gaze to the point where they were looking (if you weren’t too unnerved to [...]

A few months ago I moved to Reno, Nevada. Although I haven’t been to a casino yet myself, living in a so-called ‘casino town’ makes you acutely aware of the effects of gambling on people. But why do people gamble to begin with? Surely if we know that the odds are stacked against us, we [...]

Brittany Fallon is a PhD candidate at the Université de Neuchâtel who works on the Sonso chimpanzee community of the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda. Here she shares some of her insights into their sexual displays. In today’s focal party, the main characters are Nambi, the Alpha female who engages in regular sexual relations [...]

We are thrilled to pass along the news that Scientific American has won this year’s prestigious Science in Society award, given by the National Association of Science Writers, for the essay Ban Chimp Testing that appeared online and in our October 2011 issue. The article made the argument that medical testing caused such psychological harm [...]

Chimpanzees are mostly peaceable creatures, spending much of their time foraging for food and grooming each other. But occasionally they kill their own kind. Why they engage in these lethal bouts of aggression has been uncertain. One theory holds that killing is an evolved strategy for reducing competition for resources; another posits that human disturbance—including [...]

Relative to our ape brethren, humans give birth to really big babies. This especially substantial infant size—along with newborns’ large heads and general helplessness—helped to spur the development of more advanced social systems to help mother and child safe, researchers think. A new study examines the evolution of this trend to try to pinpoint when [...]

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance writer and contributing editor for Scientific American. Her book Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature In the Sea is out now from Penguin/Current. Katherine can be found on Twitter as @KHCourage.

On January 31, 1961, a brave 3-year-old chimpanzee was strapped into a capsule inside the Mercury Redstone rocket and launched 160 miles above the earth. For 16 minutes, he orbited at a speed of 5857 mph before crashing down into the Atlantic Ocean, a little dehydrated, but otherwise unharmed. This furry astronaut, dubbed HAM (for [...]

Kalliopi Monoyios is an independent science illustrator. She has illustrated several popular science books including Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Find her at www.kalliopimonoyios.com.
Kalliopi can be found on Twitter as @symbiartic.

[It's with great pleasure the Symbiartic team is featuring this Guest Post by illustrator Nathaniel Gold. Gold is the artist behind the wonderful illustrations found on The Primate Diaries by Eric Michael Johnson, and has twice been featured as Image of the Week (once, twice) here on the Scientific American Blog Network. I was excited [...]